I know The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t the finest offering from the Indiana Jones franchise, but there’s a moment at the end of the movie that should be shown as a warning to every young creative about to embark on their career.
The head of the university’s archaeology department, played by Jim Broadbent, inspects the name and title that a signwriter is lovingly painting onto Indy’s office door. Delighted by what he sees, the academic cheerfully exclaims,
“Marvellous! Perfect! Make the letters bigger! Much bigger!”
I’ve lost count of how often a client has pulled this kind of breezy ‘Can you just..?’ milarkey on me. You spend hours crafting something based on preliminary drawings that they approved, only to have them announce that if I can just move the entire composition six inches to the left and then paint in a hugely complicated addition that they’ve just dreamt up, it would be perfect. No rush. Any time in the next half an hour would be fine.
Often, the problems start before you even get to the final artwork stage. This happens when the client has ‘I’ll know what I want when I see it’ syndrome. They give you airy assurances that they trust your creativity, and that you have free rein to do what you think works. Then, when you present them with a few ideas, they give you horribly vague feedback that is precisely no help whatsoever in enabling you to zero in on what will work for them.
The phrase, ‘Something a bit like…’ is thrown around a lot in moments such as these. Unfortunately, the ‘something’ they have in mind is a hopeless analogue for what will work for the job in hand.
It’s often born of anxiety. They are desperate to commission the right thing. But they have no clue what that is, so they are totally incapable of making a decision when a great idea is placed in front of them. And occasionally, the client has no visual imagination, and they believe that a static image can do more than it is capable of in reality. So, they end up throwing a plethora of ideas at a project, leaving it a confusing mess. ‘Less is more’ is a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s 100% true.
In such circumstances I always politely explain that this isn’t my first rodeo, and that they should just trust me to originate a successful piece. If they can’t trust me to do that, we should part ways.
I never expect a client to come to me with fully formed ideas. In fact, I love collaborating with people to ensure that we get a piece of artwork to where they need it to be. But I do ask that they trust my instincts, and lean on my experience and advice.
Anyway, if you’re a creative reading this, and any of it rings true, I’d love to hear your comments. Thanks, as ever, for reading this far.
Some clients seemingly entirely lacking in visual literacy would often respond to my cartoons with perfect, love it, but could you just take out/modify ‘x’´. X being the fulcrum of the whole piece and without it the cartoon was reduced to a mundane nothing of a drawing. Pointless. It was uncanny how they could zero in. They could see the bit that made it work but apparently could only comprehend it as a discomfort without understanding its purpose. I think they were fearful of making a statement and that blandness was the preferred policy.